Sky Girls
by venuscomb
Summary: Stories and scenes told in Brittany's voice directly to Santana. Connected, but they move in time and mood. Canon.
1. Lover

The only lights are on the stage, and you're covered in pinks. I sit eighth row center, my hands folded on my denim skirt, and I watch you twist your fingers together, over and over. It makes me hold my hands tighter, my fingers beginning to ache. You sing without a mic. Brad plays, all in black; you sing all in black, knee high boots and slit skirt and a jacket buttoned all the way to the collar. You've been covering up more lately, and I wonder what you're thinking about when you get dressed in the morning.

The song is Lover Man, except every time you should say 'man' you just let your voice hover. _Lover_ becomes a long, aching word—_Lover, oh now where can you be? _

Earlier, you whispered against my mouth, _No one knows this song_, and you nudged me back into a curtain in the wings. You kept one of my wrists in your hands, and I left my fingers curled and slack. _I can sing it however I want and no one'll notice. _I kissed you back. I could feel, off to the side on the stage, the deep pinks of the shadows the piano cast. And Brad, too, as he went to his bench and ignored us, no sheet music in sight.

I felt your lips and didn't want to say anything, but I had to. I pressed my lips once more to yours, soft, trying to make the kiss mean _sorry, _then asked, _What about the title? _I put my free arm around your waist fast and a little too hard when I felt you tense, afraid you'd step back. Instead of kissing me you were looking at me then, from right up close. You shook your head, still almost touching my face, your eyes wide. And I still wanted to apologize, but I just kept speaking, as gently as I could. _If it's in the program, they'll see._

Scales moved through the air and covered us like water. I rubbed my hand against the small of your back, the velvet giving under my fingers like the velvet of a leaf. You slid your hand from my wrist to lace your fingers through mine, and stepped us back so that I was mostly hidden in the heavy red curtain. You leaned in and rested your forehead against my cheek again, and I felt my body loosen.

Velvet around me, velvet of your jacket under my fingers, against my palm. Red covered up everything now; I couldn't see anything but you and red. You spoke softly against my neck, and I kept my arm tight around you, keeping us steady.

_I just want to sing you a song, Britt. Just one song. _Not angry. Or scared. Just tired, like on a day you've been fighting with people all day in the halls, the reasons not making much sense.

The piano's music soaked through the curtains like each hammer was wrapped in cloth before it hit the string. My voice getting all lost in the velvet, I told you, _Sing it that way now. It's just me now. Well, me and Brad. _You laughed, your voice soft on my skin.

And I came out here to the long rows of seats, and you moved center stage, heels sharp on the boards, and Brad began something low and jazzy and so much clearer now, since we weren't all wrapped up there in the wings.

And you're singing to me now, and it's an old song that almost nobody knows, but you do, because you love songs like this, and I do, because I love you, and I love your voice, and I love the way you sing sadness, like it's the only thing you've ever felt but not the only thing you'll ever feel. Like you know there's something else.

And you look at me. Your fingers aren't twisting together anymore. I can feel all of me relax as I watch. I can't look away from you. I can't hear anything else.


	2. Lorca

We read together, sitting side by side on your bed in the half dark. The poet's name is like the killer whale, only a different language. _Lorca. _You read the Spanish from your page, then I read the English on mine. Quiet. You tell me that somewhere, someone would play a guitar while someone read the lines. Your voice fits into the dark the way flowers fit into the shade. You tell me about _una lluvia oscura de luceros fríos, _and I tell you about a dark shower of cold stars. I think for a moment he's talking about your hair.

Somehow, when some words come back like a string of notes, you sound like a sharp cry, even though you stay soft. _They would call out, like this,_ you say._ Like it's music. _And now this poem is about you too: upon the green night, he says; then, traces of warm lily. When you say that in Spanish, _de lirio caliente, _I touch your cheek and your eyes meet mine, a little wide in the dark. You smile quickly and go back to reading. It amazes me that I can still make you nervous.

Tonight we are only going to sleep. Your voice is low and warm as you say,_ esos caballos soñolientos los lleverán, _something about drowsy horses, then you stop a little later.

_This line is about you. _

You point to it on the page, the clear polish of your nails shining. _People with their hearts in their heads._

I look into your face, then run my finger across from the line under your finger to its mate in Spanish. _El corazon en la cabeza. I'm in here, too?_

You give me the smile that tells me you have no idea how to ever leave me. You're so open that you would be soft already if I kissed you. Your lips are a little too red.

We are not doing that tonight. We are sleeping. I bump your shoulder with mine and lower my eyes to the half-dark page. You are still looking at me with all of your softness and I feel your decisions melting into the dark.

I spread open the pages with one hand, petting the paper gently, pressing the book deeper into your hand where you support its spine. I don't look at you because you'll know that I know that you're changing your mind.

_Spanish isn't very good for not kissing, _I say quietly.

You lower the book into your lap, my hand still pressed in the pages. You wait for me to look up at you, so I do. You shake your head, your smile beginning to soften your whole body. I can feel through my skin where it touches yours, how the tension in each muscle unpins.

You're so quiet. _Your voice makes it sound pretty too, Britt._

I finally smile back, but don't touch you. I tip my face closer to yours, but wait for you. If you don't move towards me, the answer's no. We'll read, and I'll love hearing your voice, and you'll still be smiling that smile and I'll still feel wonderful.

You kiss me. I leave my lips soft but still don't touch you. I wait, your lips soft against mine in a way that always startles me. You can still pull back. You put your hands in my hair, soft, your fingers brushing my neck. You can still pull back. The book is on the floor and you're in my lap. You can still pull back. Santana, you can still pull back.

You don't.


	3. Braiding

On the bare wood floor of my room, you are sitting with your back to me. You're so close your hips rest between my knees. Your hair is down and soft, and I almost lift my hands to it. Instead, I begin by running the backs of my fingers down your warm bare shoulder, starting at the bluejay-blue thin strap. You take a slow breath and straighten your back a little more, but don't say anything or turn to look.

I run my fingers down to your elbow, then lean forward, pressed briefly against your back, to brush all the way to your wrist, scraping our bracelets together lightly on the way. You open up to expose your palm, to fan your fingers where I move my hand behind yours and braid our fingers. You lean back to rest your head on my shoulder for a long minute. Now I can see your face, though it's blurred with closeness. I rub my cheek against yours the way a cat would. Sometimes this is part of braiding.

But we can both hear my sister playing in the next room, and we know better. I pull your hand up to my face instead, and rest it against my cheek, flattening out our hands. You turn so your forehead touches my temple, then pull back. You straighten again and this time I lift my hands to your hair.

Hair whispers. It falls between my fingers and slips, heavy and warm. But this is how we braid: three parts, perfectly even, hand over hand under hand, gathering strays from your neck, and smoothing my fingers along the edges of your face so nothing is caught loose. When I find a single strand against your cheek, I unwork the braid quickly and gently, working from the bottom up. I'm careful with my fingers not to comb out your hair too much, so your hair hangs still and in one piece, like the dark. I begin again, and you tilt your chin down so that your braid pulls under my fingers like a rope.

_Remember when we tried braiding our hair together, BrittBritt?_

I smile, which you feel without touching my face, because you seem to tilt back, just a little, and I give up and scoot forward and wrap my arms around your waist. You lean your head against my shoulder again, only this time the soft rope of your hair is pressed between us.

_It looked good. _Your voice is very soft, like bird wings.

_Like a black-and-goldfinch,_ I agree.

_Mmm._ You close your eyes, black feathers of your eyelashes dropping down, and wrap your arms on top of mine across your belly. You let me take more of your weight.

_You didn't get enough sleep last night. _

_You didn't let me._ I can hear you smiling.

I turn my cheek so that you can feel me smiling back. And I think of braiding again._ I found strands of your hair in mine after._

You frown. Open your eyes. _So did I._

_Did you like it? _I don't mean my voice to be so quiet.

Your sigh runs all along my body and tightens our arms around you. Your voice is even softer. _I always want a part of you with me. Even when I stay away from you._

Sometimes all the color seems to get deeper. All at once. The blue in your shirt has more peacock in it, your skin and mine are warmer and brighter, the pale blues and greens in my walls are more real than the sky outside. I want to kiss you but don't. _I could braid some yellow thread into your hair. _

You close your eyes again, turn your cheek closer into mine._ It would have to be a really pale yellow to look like your hair._

_I know._

You reach back and run your fingers through my hair, gently, starting with the press of your hand to my head. You sit up. _Help me undo the braid._

You don't need my help. But you want the slide of my hand between yours, parting two pieces of the braid as your fingers work. Your hair loose again, you lean back against me, a deep press, and reach blindly back and pull my hair forward over your shoulder, combing it through yours. You reach for my hand the way I took yours earlier, locking our fingers together. You drag my hand down so my hand grazes our hair over your breast. We are both looking at the black and pale yellow. Each color seems to make the other shimmer.

My sister is singing in the next room. If I hear her moving, we'll pull apart slowly. If we don't and she comes, I'll say we're playing with each other's hair. She would be calm; you wouldn't.

Though lately, you seem to be slowing down, taking your time. Thinking about what's okay to lose. Whether we are or aren't an impossible thing.


	4. Seeing

I know it's supposed to matter that you're a girl and I'm a girl. I just don't know why. When your mouth is on mine you're warm, silky-soft, but that's not the reason I love kissing you. If I opened my eyes and your eyes had changed to green, they would still be your eyes. If your body changed as I ran my hands down to your hips, it would still be _your _body. If your body looked like someone else's, and I didn't know, and then you turned and looked at me across a room, or in the street, I would know it was you. Right away, without stopping to think. I would know you just from how you look at me. So why should someone care if you're a girl and I'm a girl? If I'm in love with you?

But whether they care who we are or what we do together, when we're together, they're right that it changes. I know you aren't the same person kissing me as you are when you look in someone else's face. I know that when I kiss you I'm different from when I kiss someone else, because when I'm with you, I'm different. The person I am doing geometry and thinking of you is a different person from the one doing geometry and not. As one, I'm learning lines and angles and tiny numbers. As the other, I'm learning the world and your body, and your face.

And I love your body, your face. I hate it when we have to stay away. I think I'm supposed to have my hands in your hair, your fingers combing through mine, slow and gentle, like you're searching for jewels, or like I'm an artwork made of paper. I can't stop looking at you, it doesn't matter if you're across the room, or if there are a dozen people in between you and me. We search each other out like we have calls like two birds might have calls, just for each other, that no one else can understand. It doesn't matter if they see us or hear us. They can't see us or hear us.


	5. The Night Moves

On nights when you aren't here, I spend a lot of time in the dark by my window. I sit on the floor, looking up, because you can see the stars and the tree branches better that way. Everything moves at night, if I hold still long enough. It's not always clear what it is. But sometimes it's bats, like mouse-angels, or a snowy owl lights up, so quiet, making me relieved for a second we keep our cats inside, even though I worry about their independence. And the tree branches move, a cross between a bed of lace for the birds and a web for the squirrels' handsprings.

The stars move too. When I was little I thought the stars held still. Then when someone said they moved, I was afraid that meant all the stars would melt one by one down the sky, till none were left. Instead they turn in a way I can keep track of, like the metal clicks on a music box. Only they light up at night instead of making music.

It's just that things move, Santana. Whether or not you do anything to stop it. Whether or not you're prepared for it. And even if you get ready forever, controlling everything and making everything perfect, it can still change when you're not looking. So when I grab my jacket and walk towards the woods, everything's always moving in the dark: the foxes with their eyes bright as dimes, the owls searching through the leaves on the ground, from the air, and everything rustling.

I know you hate it when I walk at night. You gave me this look after touching your cheek to mine one night, when you opened the door. Your cheek was so warm I knew mine was cold. You asked me, _Been walking, BrittBritt? _And I gave you what I hoped was a cute little smile, asked you if you were going to warn me about stranger danger.

And you got so quiet. Even though we were in your front hallway, you put your hands on my cheeks and pressed your body almost all the way up to mine. I looked in your eyes but was afraid to touch you back. And you said in this soft voice, _I don't just worry about strangers, Britt. _And everything went through my head at once as I put my arms around you, my cheek against your hair: foxes' bright eyes, owls, you pulling me down in the dark, people whispering, you terrified of them, me trying to calm you down by being calm.

_I haven't been afraid of the dark since I was six, _I tell you. And it's not fair, and it's not what you mean, but I can't stay out of the dark, I can't be afraid all the time, I can't act like I don't have the right to walk where I want to.


	6. Like Daphne

Our backs against the brick wall, we sat on the wooden floor of the dance studio and talked about nothing. You pushed my hair off my neck where it stuck close with sweat, dabbed at my temples and forehead along the hairline with the back of your hand. Gold squares of light from the windows touched the floor and reflected in the big mirror, and where the edges of the mirror were cut at an angle, rainbows got loose and wandered over the dark red bricks. The two of us took up a tiny piece of the mirror. I'd crossed my legs underneath me and you had one of your hands in my lap and were playing with the black laces of my modern flats. In the mirror it wasn't clear what you were doing, which made my skin slowly begin feeling hot. But mostly I was looking at me all in black, and you in a white blouse and jeans, and how we both had our hair down and perfectly straight, so we managed to look like we go together, but still nothing alike.

You reached further across me and pulled my ballet practice skirt out of my bag and began running your hands under the see-through black cloth, your hand moving lightly against my knee as you stroked. _So soft_. And I nodded, and said it was like Daphne. You put your head on my shoulder and didn't say anything. We began playing with each other's fingers through the cloth and listened to my dance teacher closing the blinds and beginning to lock up.

And as we were walking back to my house the sun was lower in the sky, and I could feel the cement under my shoes and your arm rubbing along mine, smooth as glass, and the leaves everywhere were like Daphne. They were so thin, and the light behind them showed through the leaves, like tinted glass, or like colored paper held up to a soft light bulb.

I first saw Daphne in a museum in another country. I stood looking up at her fingers turning into leaves, perfectly smooth white stone, perfectly sharp and perfectly soft at the same time, and I remember hearing a man talk about how she turned into a tree to escape someone, the man in the statue. A god, I think, who wasn't good at no. But mostly I stopped listening, because I had to get as close as I could to her fingers. Where her fingers were changing into leaves, the stone was cut so thin that light shone through them. Light, falling through stone. I'd had no idea something like that could be real. She reached for light and her fingers changed and filled with it.

We walked home, and I was dazed, looking everywhere and seeing the things like Daphne—mostly leaves and flowers with the sunlight through them. And we got home and settled into other things. Then days later, when I thought we were talking about something else, you looked up at me, all of a sudden, and said, _Diaphanous. The ballet skirt. _And I looked down at you where you were lying over an open math book, and smiled back at you.

And saw one more thing. Light gets inside your eyes, San, a kind of shimmer, when you smile at me. Light falling through, colored and clear.


	7. Hummingbird

I see you when I close my eyes. I see you when I close my eyes, Santana, and I didn't say anything about love, but when you're humming against my lips I don't know what else to think. I don't know what to think, but you're here, and humming against my mouth. Brushing your lips like wings on my neck, a hummingbird, all feather and shimmer and gloss. You skim, you dart, you hover. Your eyes hold me close to you for a moment that seems to take forever and leaves me hardly breathing, then you're gone—gone to bury yourself in my neck again, gone with words that don't feel like you mean them.

I learned long ago not to listen to your words—or at least not so much as to your eyes, your voice, your body—your words that cut—your eyes that hold, voice that warms me, skin that soothes. You tell me none of it means anything, then your hair falls like a curtain against my cheek. You tell me you're here for an hour, and then it's midnight and I feel you digging your chin deeper into my shoulder. You say something else I barely hear, then the sun is melting into the bed and I feel your arm pinned under my belly and it's been asleep for hours, it has to have been.

No one is like you. Every mouth that I've kissed was searching for something: searching for heat, or that taste you can share, animal to animal, or for something that's lost, or for something I'm helpless to give. I can always feel that _looking, _a kind of feeling that beats like wind against my skin. I don't know who they think I am, when they kiss me. I felt it from them; you were searching for me. I always feel you searching for me.


End file.
